1st Grade Common Core Documentation

From the sounds of it, everyone is going to Common Core, which I am pretty excited about. I have sold several of my Common Core documentation packets on my TpT store (thank you!!!) I have to write things down by hand, so these documents are handy for people like me :) I decided to make up 1st Grade Common Core packets too! Over the summer I plan on getting all the elementary grade levels posted. Click on the links below to pick up your copies!

1st Grade Common Core: Reading & Language Arts

1st Grade Common Core: Mathematics

And 2nd grade teachers, don't forget to pick up your copies, too!

2nd Grade Common Core: Reading & Language Arts

2nd Grade Common Core: Mathematics

TWO MORE DAYS!!! :)

Year End Affirmations and MONSTERS!

I cannot believe I have made it to the last week of school! I am so excited, but I am really going to miss this group. They are some of the sweetest, kind-hearted kids!

Friday we started Cara's adorable Memory Book! If you haven't picked up this FREEBIE, you need to NOW! So stinkin' cute! We kept working on it throughout the day today, and tomorrow we will do our autograph session! The kids can't wait!

This morning my kiddos got their Weekend Story Books and got to illustrate the cover!  They were EXCITED! Every Monday my kids have to write a Weekend Story. I file them in order all year long make a big stack and hope that my assistant or Amy's daughter will file them away for me :) I always start off really well, then I get lazy. ANYWAY! I always make them a book of all their Weekend Stories throughout the year. It is so cool to hear them say to their friends, "Do you remember...?" "Look how I used to spell this!" "Look how long my stories are now!" So sweet!

This morning we did a very easy actvity that I LOVE doing, and it's always a favorite of my class. I have the kids draw a picture of their faces in the center of white construction paper. They write their name above their face. Then we all come to the carpet and get in a big circle. We pass our papers around the circle, and write a nice affirmation on each friend's poster. It makes the kids feel so good!

We also did Candy Bar Awards this afternoon! They thought it was so cool!! And it was cool because the kids could pretty well predict who would get which award :)

Last but not least, we finished up our tissue box monsters that we started on Friday! FYI, washable paint does NOT work on tissue boxes so well.... We had to whip out the (un-washable) acrylic, but it worked WAY better. These turned out so dang cute! We are going to vote on our favorites tomorrow!

Okay, I am out! But one last thing....

Minute to Win It!

I cannot believe there are only 5 more days of school!! We are having a lot of fun with our 10 day countdown, and it is definitely helping me keep my sanity :) We did our paper airplane activity one day, read to someone outside, which they LOVED, a Hawaiian Luau, free recess, and today we did Minute to Win It! Oh lord, I wish I had my camera because it was HI-LAR-IOUS.

Activity #1

We gave each kiddo a popsicle stick and a handful of cheerios. They had to stick the popsicle sticks in their mouths, then make a stack of 5 cheerios on the stick. Kind of hard (especially with the wind!), but many of them did it!

Activity #2

You may have seen the oreo activity... Well I had Ritz crackers, which worked just as well. You have the kids tilt their heads back and put the cracker on their foreheads. Using ONLY their face muscles, they must move the cracker down into their mouths. OMG Amy and I were DYING. A lot of them were able to do this one, too!

Activity 3

We got some pasta with some little holes in it and pipe cleaners. The kids got in pairs. One kid held the pipe cleaner with one hand, while the other  tried to "string" the pasta onto the pipe cleaner using only one hand.

Activity #4

We had a class competition; my class against Amy's. We got 2 tissue boxes, and got our kids in 2 lines. The point of the game was to be the first class to empty the box of tissues. They could only take one out at a time, so the kids each got several turns :) It was so funny and the looooooved it.

Tomorrow our activity will be a Monster Painting Party (to go with Where the Wild Things Are)!!

I hope everyone is enjoying their last days (or summer if it's already started!) TGI(almost)F!!

Miss Nelson is Missing FREEBIE :)

We read Miss Nelson is Missing this week, and the kids loved it! I love reading the book towards the end of the year. I find myself saying, "We don't want to act like Miss Nelson's class, do we??" I always want to come to school one day dressed as Viola Swamp, but I am not brave enough :)

Now, I am not going to lie-I used several pages from the portal that comes with the book because I am just TIRED. And with our Mother's Day books, I just needed something EASY (please tell me I am not the only one!!) But we were able to incorporate a few fun activities in the process :)

This book has a lot of homonyms in it, so we made these quick, easy little pages..

Since the portal does fact and opinions, we did a quick little F&O writing of our own.

In the book, Miss Nelson's kids are so naughty that they throw paper airplanes in class. Well, today we did a paper airplane toss!! The kids FLIPPED! They have never been allowed to make paper airplanes at school before. Amy and I gave our classes each a piece of paper and told them to just make a paper airplane. I was amazed at how many didn't know how to make them! It was rainy today, so we had to do this activitiy inside, but it worked out. We decided to measure the distances in meters, A) to go with our math series and B) because we thought the kids would throw the planes a lot further than they did, haha.

That is my plane that went 6-8 meters... just sayin' :)

Originally we had planned to have the kids use the record sheet that you can get in this FREEBIE, but because of other school events, we needed to make this activity a little quicker. We measured and marked the distances on the ground in front of the kids. Then we had 3 kids come up at a time, throw the planes, and we had one student tally the whole group's data. Then we came back together and filled out this chart. It worked out just as well!

This was a really fun activity for the kids, and they really loved this book.

Click HERE for a Miss Nelson is Missing  FREEBIE from my TpT store! It includes the Fact and Opinion page, a comprehension test (I like to throw those in every now and then), and Paper Airplane Data pages (that I had intended on using). Hope you can use them :)

9 days left!

Happy weekend!



Fun With Fractions Pack!

So how many days does everyone have left? We are down to 12! I cannot wait to get to single digits! We are reading Miss Nelson is Missing this week. And let me say, it's always a great book to pull out towards the end of the year :) It helps some of your sweeties who are acting like Miss Nelson's students behave a little better :)

The last week and a half of school will be spent with Where the Wild Things Are {sad news about Maurice Sendak :( "Please don't go. We'll eat you up, we love you so."} We will also do end of the year type stuff :)

Okay, so the main reason for this post is that I just posted my Fun With Fractions Pack on TpT! I hope you'll check it out :)

This pack includes the following:

Fraction Matching Game
Story Problem pages (and blank templates)
Math Journal Prompts
I have...Who has? whole group game

Ice Cream Sundae Craftivity

Hope everyone is surviving these last couple of weeks!!

Fun in the Sun Math Journal Pack!

First of all, I just want to say that I love Teacher Appreciation Week!

Last night I loaded my Fun in the Sun Math Journal Prompts onto TpT. It would be a great addition to your end of the year math lessons! I hope you'll check it out; click the picture below!

Butterflies and Fractions

Is it really only Tuesday?? I am trying my very best to keep my kiddos' attention these last few weeks, but it's been a bit of a challenge. They are tired of being tested. I am tired of testing. Many of them are just D-O-N-E. And can't say that I'm not daydreaming about being poolside... :)

I am trying to squeeze in as much as possible these next couple of weeks, and I am sad to say that I had to shorten my Eric Carle unit to almost nothing! Instead of the big unit I usually do, we are using his books to learn about the moral of a story. Each day for a mini lesson, I am reading one of his books to my kids and we are discussing its moral. They are loving it so far! We are recording our morals in our little "poof" books. Here are some samples from last year...

Yesterday was an unofficial"Butterfly Day." We tied in fiction and nonfiction books, which the kids LOVED. Here are the books we read...

 To illustrate the life cycle of a butterfly, we used pasta!

We will continue with our moral journals this week using Eric Carle books.

Today we started reading

Alexander hopes that his friend drops his double decker ice cream cone in Australia, so to make him have a better day we made him Fraction Sundaes!

You will be able to find a template for our Fracion Sundaes in my Fun with Fractions Pack that I am finishing.

I will be posting it to my little store soon :)